O2 does Apple-flavour customer service

Everything is fine! Even when it's not

O2 seems to have picked up more than the iPhone from Apple - the operator has also been taking lessons in how to ignore press enquires and stonewall its customers.

O2's network seems particularly prone to problems lately: iPhone users travelling abroad have been erroneously charged for roamed data, while those at home have been lucky to get connected at all. But the operator feels no compulsion to explain these problems beyond blaming the first on Apple and saying the second has been sorted, so not to worry.

Some of the more cosmopolitan iPhone users came home to find they'd been charged for data they hadn't used, which O2 reckons was "due to a fault with the iPhone 3.0 OS software" according to a text sent to those customers, which also explained that the operator was "really sorry" and that it will refund the charge on the next bill. When we asked O2 about that we were told the problem won't be fixed until the next version of the iPhone software in September, but O2 declined to provide us with any details of how such a bug could incur roaming charges.

Our best guess would be that the handset is performing a GPRS connect without user interaction, and probably without transmitting data. But dealing with O2 and Apple we're probably not going to find out much more: at least not through official channels.

Such channels are equally un-illuminating regarding the failure of the data network earlier this week, or the disconnection of roaming customers in "some countries". Last week's failure was attributed to IP address allocations, but this week we're expected to just trust that O2 has fixed whatever problems it had and we should all stop worrying about it: "We identified the cause of the issue quickly and service was restored," it said brightly.

So that's OK then: glad to hear that none of the problems will reoccur, unless they do. ®